Stacey Robinson

Six thousand miles

War is not quiet.
It’s filled with the blare
Of rockets
And sirens
And inconsolable screams.

I can hear this,
Even six thousand miles away.

Sirens race past my window,
A trumpeting of danger,
To herald
incoming wounded
Bound for the hospital
Only blocks away.
They’re nothing but
Pale echoes
Not the banshee wail of war,
With their warnings of
Incoming rockets –
Incoming destruction,
Measuring precision in
the radius of a widening
Circle.

I pause, even so,
Disquieted.
Now I hear them differently,
these sirens,
even six thousand miles away.

Every monitor
Is filled with the screeching,
screaming
Noise of war –
With talking heads,
And jagged rubble,
And incendiary,
Incandescent
Rage.
And all of it stops,
in unsettled
rattling stillness,
That is never quite
Quiet,
To honor the grieving
of soldiers
and civilians
For their Dead.

War is an after image
of fireworks
captured behind closed eyes.
I wait for the
coming boom,
The unrelenting sound
of war,
and the grainy
gritty
barrage of
pictures
and pain.

I watch it unfold,
This time-lapsed flower,
Blossoming violence
and bursting
bright
Red
on a plasma screen.

Six thousand miles feels
Like inches
on plasma.

Images course through
The wired veins of my
television,
Traveling six thousand miles
In ones and zeroes,
To flow through the plasma
That connects me
To the world
And the noise of
War.